Keuka College Professor of History Dr. Chris Leahy is once again preparing to address a national audience.
Just months after a presentation by Dr. Leahy was broadcast on C-SPAN, he’ll take part in an online discussion hosted by the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library on Wednesday, Feb. 9, at 5 p.m. (EST). The topic of both forums: President John Tyler, whose life and career Dr. Leahy documented in his recent biography, “President without a Party: The Life of John Tyler.”
During the Zoom webinar, which is open to the public (free registration is required), Dr. Leahy will take part in a moderated discussion led by LBJ Library Director Mark Lawrence. There will also be questions from the audience.
The 75-minute discussion is one of six separate sessions that make up the series, “The Presidents: The Lives Behind the Legends,” which is co-sponsored by the LBJ Library and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at the University of Texas at Austin.
“President without a Party,” published in 2020, was the first comprehensive biography of Tyler in some 80 years. The Wall Street Journal called it a “deeply researched, gracefully written reappraisal” of the nation’s 10th president – the first to ascend to the Oval Office from the vice presidency.
In being selected for the LBJ Library series, Dr. Leahy is in select company: two of the other participating authors – Frederik Logevall, who spoke on John F. Kennedy, and Annette Gordon-Reed, who discussed Thomas Jefferson – have won the Pulitzer Prize for History.
Dr. Leahy, who has taught at Keuka College for 15 years, is a nationally recognized expert on the U.S. presidency and 18th- and 19th-century American politics. He is the author of numerous journal articles and scholarly reviews, and is currently at work on a biography of John Tyler’s wife, Julia Gardiner Tyler, to be co-authored with his wife, Sharon Williams Leahy.
